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No Depression has been the foremost journalistic authority on roots music for well over a decade, publishing 75 issues from 1995 to 2008. No Depression ceased publishing magazines in 2008 and took to the web. We have made the contents of those issues accessible online via this extensive archive and also feature a robust community website with blogs, photos, videos, music, news, discussion and more.

Live (Back Porch)

“We will sell no wine before its time,” Orson Welles once proclaimed in a commercial. J. J. Cale appears to have adopted a similar attitude toward live recordings. Thirty years after the release of Naturally, his debut album, the 62-year-old singer-songwriter has issued his first live album.

Drawn from shows recorded between 1990 and 1996, it offers a balanced retrospective of Cale’s career. Best-known for songs that were hits for Eric Clapton (“After Midnight” and “Cocaine”) and Lynyrd Skynyrd (“Call Me The Breeze”), Cale gets a chance to reclaim his material.

“After Midnight” is recast as a solo number featuring just Cale and his guitar. Bassist Bill Raffensperger joins in on a wistful “Old Man” before the entire band comes onstage and launches into “Call Me The Breeze”, which offers the musicians plenty of room to stretch out. Cale’s laid-back approached on guitar and vocals gives the music room to breathe on “Sensitive Kind” and “Money Talks”, the latter featuring a duet with Christine Lakeland.

Cale shifts gears as he and Lakeland get a bluesy rhythm going with their guitars on “River Boat Song”, and he seems to be energized by the crowd’s reaction. “Mama Don’t” is a joyful romp with the full band and Cale inspiring each other.

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Roger McGuinn - I Want to Preserve the Songs • There are many facets to Roger McGuinn. Among them, of course, is the durable rock icon whose fanciful songs, plaintive vocals and ringing 12-string Rickenbacker were the abiding …

Junior Brown - Out of this world • In 1997, an independent film titled The Planet Of Junior Brown highlighted the Toronto International Film Festival. When I stumbled across that title during a web search for a cer…

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